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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22760683">mad teens on film</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeysugarchocolate/pseuds/honeysugarchocolate'>honeysugarchocolate</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Block B, Winner (Band), iKON (Korea Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternative Universe - Delinquents, Angst and Feels, Character Death, M/M, Miscommunication, Non-Graphic Violence, Song Minho Just Wants To Be Loved, for the record this is not a polyamory, i am: sorry, poetry vomit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 11:47:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,090</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22760683</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeysugarchocolate/pseuds/honeysugarchocolate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere between rooftops, milk cartons, street fights and the acidic taste of blood, Song Minho both finds and loses himself.</p><p>Or; the story of a three who became a two.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kim Jiwon | Bobby/Song Minho | Mino, Song Minho | Mino/Woo Jiho | Zico</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. the lawn is drowning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The beginning of it all is Minho's favourite. The moment cut his scalp open and kissed his brain so that everything before it blurs into grainy softness— irrelevant, pointless. So that this moment and only this moment would matter. </p><p>It starts when Song Minho in his first year of high school, cloudy-eyed and pliant, moves to Seoul and reunites with his childhood friend Woo Jiho— only Jiho isn't quite who he remembered. </p><p>Over four years the kid with the flubby cheeks and glasses that never seemed to fit had turned into something of leopard eyes and thunderstorm skies. He picks Minho up from the train station riding a motorcycle that makes Minho's skin ridiculously tremble, plush wide leather seats and all sharp, angled shines. </p><p>"Hurry hurry before Bobby catches up," he tells Minho and Minho has no idea who Bobby is until he turns around, still holding his luggage, and sees from the corner of his eyes this massive mob of people with metal bars and wooden bats storming towards them, led by a purple haired guy, whose wired gaze alone is enough to break parts of your skeleton and grind your bones, shouting, "WOO JIHO, YOU FUCK."</p><p>And Jiho turns to Minho, winks, and says, "That's Bobby. He's kind of angry right now." And Minho kind of just stares at Jiho, bug-eyed and shocked, utterly out of any words.</p><p>Five years from now, this is how the legend will go, swimming in everyone's head— Minho met Bobby while riding on the back of Jiho's bike, which was technically Bobby's, and was why Jiho was riding it, really. And somewhere between then and now, Minho finds Bobby sitting alone on the rooftop during lunch, staring at the sun, and offers him his milk carton. Bobby doesn't take it but he unidolizes the sun to look at Minho and they do talk about Jiho, and find mutual interest in chewing him up like watermelon flavored gum, picking out all his faults and lining them in order of intolerability. </p><p>The next time Minho finds Bobby on that rooftop, leaning back on the railing, sunlight in his lashes, humid air between his lips, dozing off, he leaves the milk carton by Bobby's side and this time Bobby takes it and Minho wishes if he was there to see it trickle like white lightning down his chin. </p><p>After that, when Jiho goes off picking a fight and drags Minho into it, Bobby joins them in a blink, almost as if they'd always been on the same side.</p><p>"I didn't know you liked me, Bob," Jiho grins, spitting blood and moons. </p><p>Bobby stink-eyes him between punches, "Fuck off, ferret club." </p><p>And between them Minho laughs and laughs and Jiho probably knows what it means— how Bobby, the boy who ate Mars like it's a malt, looks at Minho, and the way Minho lets Bobby sling an arm around his shoulder and lean into him, but not Jiho. </p><p>Never Jiho. </p><p> </p><p>In retrospect it should've been obvious how, when Minho leaves Jiho to go join Bobby on the rooftop, Jiho's laugh that comes from somewhere deep in his stomach, withers and decays in the spaces between his vertebras— but Jiho doesn't say a word. </p><p>And Minho is so blinded by the sun; soaking in Bobby's smiles and words that dribble down his lips like a melting raspberry popsicle, and the way Bobby's laughs make him lose his grip and flare up the jumbled chemicals in his head that he doesn't even notice. </p><p>One time Jiho comes up to the roof looking for him, only to see Bobby lying drowsy kisses on Minho sunscreen coated cheeks, and Minho giggling like a child. A giggle that Jiho's never heard before but could live forever in the echo it leaves in an empty room. Though it now only echos in his hollowed out ribcage.</p><p>Minho had come to Seoul as Jiho's friend, because Jiho had told him over the phone, the air watery and the ceiling dyed blue from the night's light, his voice floating like smoke, "I'm so lonely here by myself, Minho-yah."</p><p>But before Minho knows it he isn't really Jiho's friend any more. The vague white shapes against the sun replace the mischievous shimmers in Jiho's eyes, and the dew on his and Bobby's intertwined palms replaces Jiho's wet pinky that he'd shoved into Minho's ear too often. He is still desk-partners with Jiho, perhaps only that, but he never picks up on how when Jiho smiles his eyes don't light up with the glow of summer moons like they used to, or how Jiho gradually stops asking if he wants to hang out. </p><p>All he notices is Jiho getting into more and more fights. Jiho picking the wars he is bound to lose, that he knows he will lose, and no longer asking Minho or Bobby to come save him. Only showing up at Minho's doorstep in the velvet night, with faded eyes that are hazy around the edges, veins paper maché, nose bleeding and knuckles grounded to the bones asking Minho to help stitch him up. A slow meaningless self-destruction, from the outside in. </p><p>Gradually, that too stops. After Jiho sees the spare toothbrush in Minho's bathroom. Then the jacket that definitely isn't Minho's hanging on the back of his door. And finally walking in on a half dressed Bobby dozing off on Minho's bed, with Minho by his side, braiding strands of his hair, listening to him breathe as he sleeps and mumbling things like waves crashing on a powdery white sandy shore. </p><p>The seat beside Minho begins vacating for longer and longer periods of time, the exhausted rasp of its owner's vulgar words and lame jokes becomes something like a fading stain of a memory at the back of his skull, until one day Minho looks at the graffiti Jiho had etched onto the edge —“DONG MINHO”— and remembers that Jiho used to sit there, that they used to breathe with one another, and that he's been gone for— a week, no, a month, maybe. No one knows where Jiho had gone. </p><p>It's almost like the blue breath of the summer breeze has blown him away, out of existence. </p><p> </p><p>;;;</p><p> </p><p>For the next few weeks Minho digs through Seoul, flips it outside in, leaves the skyscrapers crumbling on his wake, and he finds Jiho on a hospital bed, his entire head swallowed in bandages just like Minho's heart is swallowed by the cracks in the sky that suddenly feel so near they could slice him in half, because Jiho is quiet, so quiet. Quiet enough to make the wind jealous. </p><p>Minho kind of just stands there, with the ashes of their friendship embedded into the open hair follicles around his wrists, and he's so worried and angry that he slurs into Jiho's face over and over, mouthing the words like a forgotten prayer, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, and doesn't even wait to see Jiho wake up, just leaves with silk woven tears collecting behind his eyes, as if he's never been there. He thinks, Jiho doesn't consider him a friend any more, because if he did he would've told Minho that he needed help, he would've talked, he would've reached out. </p><p>So this is how the notorious delinquent trio of Jiho, Minho and Bobby —who everyone thought would tear the world into pieces, bite it off in chunks, grab the sun and twist it apart like the Oreoes they share between them every morning— cracked and fell apart into a Jiho, and a Bobby and Minho, half way into third year. </p><p>For a while it's kind of weird, fighting beside Bobby without Jiho there with his crimson scratches, eager touches and lanky legs tripping over themselves, without Jiho shouting behind them "Fighting!!", the smile splitting his face like Minho's shoulders in the heatwave. But the thing is Jiho hadn't been there for a long time, and it's not difficult to heal a wound that's already scabbed. </p><p>The ground is cold and their Adidas' aren't white anymore. They've bled too much. Bobby mixes their bruises as their lips grow numb against each other, and their peachy cheeks turn blue. Bobby chases the blood with his lips before it dries up, Bobby rips the bandaids off his raw skin, Bobby undoes him. "Take me apart with your tongue?" Minho tells him, and Jiho dissipates easily from his mind with the reds and blues and violets Bobby smears against his collarbones. </p><p>Time liquefies, the solar rays grow colder and paler and before Minho loops his head around it it's the first semester of senior year, and he hears from a friend of a friend of Jiho's that he's dropped out of school. And for a second it hurts him, deep down at a place that he's long forgotten, it finds a tarot card in his gut and taunts him with it, but then Bobby grabs his hand, kisses it and smiles at him, his silver hoop earrings slice through the light, reminds Minho of a fish hook, and it's easier to forget again. </p><p>Slowly Jiho disappears from Minho's thoughts— no one at school seems to remember him, kind of like he'd shot past everyone, loud and bright, a shooting star, and then faded away without a trace. </p><p>Like Neptune's melancholy, cold blue hues. Like the slow, sweet, cloying death of an earth child. </p><p> </p><p>;;;</p><p> </p><p>Years later, when Minho's walking to a morning Computer Science class, sipping on his iced coffee and texting Bobby to “not leave the door unlocked again jackass”, he hears behind him this voice that sounds terribly familiar and feels crushed under a waterfall.</p><p>He turns around and suddenly Jiho's all up in his face again, like when he'd picked him up that day at the train station, noisy and shrouded in sun rays and the brightest thing Minho had ever chanced upon. He's almost that same little blue boy who rips his bedroom and night shirts and love letters and his psyche to shreds, except he's wearing a flashy suit now, his skin an abundance of cosmic dust and tattoos, cornering some salaryman into an alley. </p><p>For a second it's difficult for Minho to decide wether to walk faster or drink slower or die quicker because it's all such a pleasurable warmth in his ribcage. He quickly follows him, unsure of what he's doing, really, because he barely even knows Jiho anymore. He barely knows the ready made microwavable skin of a man he's wearing these days. </p><p>When Jiho reaches out to strike the man, Minho stops him with a kick to the knee —Jiho was always weakest there, and he still is— after the man scrambles away, Jiho turns to Minho and stares at him, only a day older than the Sunday newspaper and bug-eyed like how Minho had been, and manages to croak out, "Oh god, Dong Minho, is that you?" and Minho punches his shoulder for calling him poop even now. </p><p>It turns out that Jiho had started working for a crime syndicate, and has recently started handling high-interest loans. "You just wrecked my lunch," Jiho whines at the sight of the man scrambling away, and his hair's few shades darker than the suns beneath his feet. Minho knuckles him hard, Jiho's warmth boiling his bones and says, "I'll treat you."</p><p>It's odd, everything is a little muddy around the edges but somehow their bond is still polished clean; Minho recognizes Jiho by the lines on his fingers and they're friends in an instant again, mashed back together in a dustpan as if they'd never been apart. And Minho doesn't realize he's been missing Jiho all along until Jiho buttons his suit jacket around Minho's chest and hugs him, opening his skull towards the clouds and un-spooling every single memory; him and Jiho playing with erasers, Jiho erasing the freckles on Minho's knuckles and Minho rubbing off the scar on Jiho's thumb. Jiho had told him it was from a bad fall but the cat had told Minho it was his parents. </p><p>Jiho makes the lamest corndog joke and Minho laughs like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard, like he's running out of time to laugh, like his cells will turn to stone tomorrow, like Jiho will leave, again. </p><p>Eventually, when Minho has to go to class, he asks Jiho for his contact information and Jiho grins like the Cheshire's cat got nothing on him and winks, "Too poor for one." Then Minho asks for his address and Jiho says, "I live in the moment." And when Minho's about to get irritated and foam up like a September storm, Jiho ruffles his hair and runs off screaming with laughter. </p><p>Minho contemplates chasing him, then something behind his arteries, something gooey and listless, tells him to give it up, because if Jiho's come back to him once, he'd come back again. </p><p>After class Minho comes back home and lets Bobby kiss him leisurely, like the sun might never melt away, until he's crawled fully inside Minho's chest to pick at what lives under the roof of his ribs. He scraps his teeth against Bobby's neck and tells him about who he'd just met, only Bobby doesn't look nearly as surprised as Minho had expected him to. </p><p>And that something that hangs by its toes in the closet behind Minho's arteries hums with discomfort.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. the sky is on fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It makes no sense at first, but a few days later, when Bobby's asleep and the sun is slowly creeping up on the horizon of the clementine sky, matching the friendly hue of Bobby's lips that inhale serenity and exhale love— Minho sneaks a peek at Bobby's phone and finds a number that he doesn't recognize at all, which Bobby calls apparently every few days. </p><p>Minho doesn't mean to pry, he loves Bobby and butchers the thought of Bobby ever cheating on him with fingers like daggers, but he can't seem to erase the curiosity so he dials it and, of course, <i>of course</i> the voice that picks up on the other end is fucking Woo Jiho's, "Hello, angry child?" </p><p>And Minho hangs up without uttering a single word, breath solidifying in his throat, gut-wrenching betrayal and confusion and anger twisting at the core of his stomach. The question is trying to crawl up his throat, like a deadly allergy, but he doesn't ask why. Doesn't ask when Bobby kisses him good morning, his aura no longer a fertilizer that makes roses bloom on Minho's sandy heart. And doesn't even talk when Jiho finds him walking home the next week. </p><p>Maybe it had always been Jiho who was trying to push Minho away, making him bleed like a river and bruise like a peach just for fun. </p><p>The notorious delinquent trio —who everyone thought would tear the world into pieces and bite it off in chunks— hadn't cracked and fallen into Jiho, and Minho and Bobby, but into Jiho and Bobby, and Minho. </p><p>After all, Minho was the last to join, and didn't know either of them like they knew each other. Didn't know their ruinations, their undoing, the lethal things they hide under their pillows. There was a time where Minho wasn't there, where the two of them sat on a bridge and watched cars crash. And maybe that's how things are meant to be. </p><p>During their walk, Minho tries to shake Jiho off, to extract him from his bone marrow, but Jiho doesn't let up and just keeps wrapping his arms around Minho, as if this would be the last time he'd see him, and he wants to crawl inside Minho's chest and leave a piece of himself under the roof of Minho's ribs, a reminder in the spaces between Minho's bones so he won't ever forget.</p><p>The toenail moon resembles a half-eaten apple that someone threw in a dumpster, it watches them and coerces Minho, finally, to tell Jiho, "I know you've been avoiding me since the beginning. You don't have to pretend to be my friend anymore."</p><p>Jiho grins, glimmering under the moonlight in a spectrum of colors, and ruffles Minho's hair delicately, with a meaning, like intricate lines in sloppy poetry, and then hugs him.</p><p>"Don't be silly, you've always been my favorite person," Jiho says, his face suddenly hovering over Minho's. Minho cowers like a hurt dog beneath the splintered glass reflection in Jiho's eyes. Jiho cups his face, grazes his arm, and then kisses him, heavily, breathing in his mouth, his tongue chilli-pepper-hot on Minho's, scorching. </p><p>It scares the shit out of Minho, the mind-shattering sensation, the horrid tingling of his nerves, like doing backflips into the sky. So the only thing he knows to do is shove him roughly, punch the lights out of him and storm off, heart drooling ichor all the way back to his apartment. </p><p>He packs up all of Bobby's things, the feelings that made him tremble in his thin grape skin that only Bobby breathed in him, and the serrated crystals of his own heart in a box, and leaves it at their doorstep. When Bobby comes knocking on the door, apricot buttered apologies bleeding through the walls, Minho doesn't open the door.  When he call, Minho doesn't pick up. </p><p>Then, when Jiho calls him, he drops the phone in the toilet, flossing out his flesh and the cold, numb hurt in the bathroom sink.</p><p> </p><p>Minho refuses to answer until maybe six, maybe eight months later —time slips like liquid sunsets between your fingers when there's nothing marking the days— Bobby shows up at his doorstep, his limbs of marble sagging, the world spinning itself to death in the shadows beneath his eyes, saying, "Sorry, hyung."</p><p>And Minho tells him to go away, Minho says he wants him out of his life, the both of them, and tries to get him to leave, the things he's buried in the bottom of his ribcage threatening to spill all over the room, pouring like an upturned fishbowl. </p><p>Bobby looks at him, his eyes sparkling with tears, like where the ocean glitters the brightest, and says, "I'm sorry. I love you, always." Then he leaves, with a kiss to Minho's cheek that burns against the very tissue of his soul. </p><p>Like this, second year of college, Minho loses both Jiho and Bobby at once, in the blink of an eye. He's left with a lonely pluto heart and stars that buzz in his head, grow clear veined wings and become fireflies that visit him at 12AM and replay the scenes of Minho's life that he's trying so hard to forget. </p><p>Years unfold and the glowing white touches and peach bruises never quite stop haunting Minho. He finishes his education and works at a small newspaper company. Jiho and Bobby and their iron-hot, blistered high school days become a soft murmur of a memory on the edge of his mind, an itch under his skin that he no longer feels like scratching until he's oozing thick blood, until he's picked himself flesh from bone. </p><p>At this point Minho is older, has learned to accept that relationships don't hold— nothing really does. Friends and lovers are made to be lost after all, they pass by in shades of tan, coming and going like the seasons. Seungyoon's loved him too much, heart too big for Minho to house inside his charcoal chest, and Seunghoon only ever took a chance on him because he's as hurt as him, but two broken halves don't always make one.</p><p>Some days, it all feels like a death wish, a night sky cut with a hollow bullet; the rumble, the memories unravel, keep him turning in his cold bed for hours, waiting for the windows to shatter from all the noise caught in his ribs. </p><p>Then one bone-white morning, freshly into his thirties, he's flipping through the obituaries of the old papers, and it's odd, happens out of nowhere, like a subatomic collision, but he sees the sparks of red and implosions that curl like a garden sprinkler —<i>Woo Jiho</i>, the letters read— listed maybe nine years too early. It's just a coincidence, he thinks, trying not to get lost in the nostalgia dripping from the sky onto his eyes, there are so many Woo Jihos in Korea, after all. </p><p>The vicious bustles of autumn are trembling outside his window, and it marks a keen realization; the year is the one when Bobby had showed up on his doorstep, tears and apologies spilling and spilling from his arms like baskets of rotten fruit, and the obituary says, and Minho doesn't mean to read it, nor does his heart mean to cower against his sternum like that, but "He was twenty-three years old and born in Seoul, attended North High School and dropped out second year..."</p><p>And Minho can't understand the rest because a bomb bang shakes his teeth like a model skeleton in his bio class back in high school, the words are turning blurry and grimy and crumpling to his fingertips, and he can't breathe properly because his bones keep cutting into his lungs as if glitter-glued the wrong way, and he thinks it over again and again, and all he can remember is the softness of Jiho's chest like the summer's earth baked by the red sun against his back when they ate lunch together, and Jiho hugging him and silencing the chaos in his head and blowing out the flames lining his organs, and Jiho kissing him and taking a bite of his apple-candy heart and telling him <i>you've always been my favorite person</i>, and Jiho running to catch up with him when he was trying to walk away the very last time they met under the waning moon. </p><p>Suddenly, all he can think of is sitting on a bridge with Jiho and watching bombs explode. Burning his tongue on Bobby's lighter. Falling in love with caramel and white teeth and summer skin drenched in cherry red blood. </p><p>And it all feels like building a noose from cherry red roses when he finds Bobby's number and calls it and miraculously it still connects. Like nothing's ever changed.</p><p> </p><p>"<i>Jiho</i>," Minho manages to croak, a taste of ashes on his tongue and before he knows it Bobby is beside him, like he's always been there, like he's the floating spit in the back of Minho's throat, the hole in his favorite blue jeans. </p><p>He's staring pensively at the space behind Minho's head, as if too scared to look him in the eyes and end up admitting that he still feels Minho's tongue in his throat, even after all these years. </p><p>"When did you know?"</p><p>"A few days after you arrived," Bobby says and his spine is a discrete line, vertebrae jutting out like teeth, a sloppy trail of question marks. </p><p>"Why didn't you tell me?"</p><p>Bobby bites his lip until he tastes acid and molten zinc and says, "Hyung said you'd be worried."</p><p>Blood red strawberry is dripping from the window and Minho stares at Bobby, who wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, the stars still match the blemishes on his face, "He said once you started worrying you wouldn't stop."</p><p>Minho doesn't feel it coming, his muscles imploding, tendon by tendon; an erosion process, but as soon as he thinks about Jiho telling Bobby not to tell, probably grinning so wide Antares reflects on his shark teeth as if it were nothing— tears swim in his eyes like koi fish and the next thing he knows he's slumped over, crust turned mantle, spine inside out, sobbing so hard he can barely inhale, and Bobby's curling around him saying, "Jiho said once you start worrying, you get angry, and once you get angry, you assault him," and Minho punches Bobby in the chest, even though there's not an ounce of energy left in his bones, not a shred of anger chipping at his heart. He's already been cut up and laid out like the pieces of a hunter's prize. </p><p>"That day, when you came to talk to me... was that when he died?"</p><p>Bobby looks at Minho, at the clusters of moonlight soaking the galactic space under his eyes along with the tears, and he nods, even though he's lying. That day he ran the whole ten kilometers to Minho's apartment with shreds of his own heart between his teeth Jiho was still alive. Jiho was sitting in his hospital bed, the gleam of his smile like a splash of colors, too stark a contrast to blend in with the grey blues of the hospital, readying for his last surgery, having promised Bobby that he would hold on one last time if Minho would come to hold his hand through it. He'd split the horizon apart like a peach, if only Minho was there to ask. </p><p>But Minho didn't show up. Bobby had begged and cried and cracked his chest open like pill bottles and Minho stood there on his doorstep, hurt and betrayed, bleeding on his feet, liquefying into a pool of red right where he stood, flooding the entire apartment, a new red sea, and said, "There's nothing to be sorry for to a stranger, Bobby." </p><p>And so Bobby never made it to beg or punch Jiho into surviving his last surgery, and by the time Bobby was back in the hospital, neck drenched in sweat and dirt and the red residue of a broken heart, the surgeon was glancing through the waiting room for "Woo Jiho's family" and the first thing Bobby heard after "We're not friends, Bobby, we're not anything" was "Jiho didn't make it. I'm so sorry."</p><p>The first light of morning leaked through the window and Bobby found himself all alone, licking his wounds and trying hard to soak up oxygen through the cracks between his ribs.</p><p>Minho wouldn't know any of it, and Bobby won't tell him because Jiho had made him promise, a honey gold smile smeared on his face even in his deathbed, a look in his eyes that purged Bobby out to fit the memory in his empty stomach because the buzzing in his head was far too loud.</p><p>The day they buried Jiho it was raining, and there was no one except a drunk Bobby and the priest and a heavily tattooed guy from Jiho's work who looked like he barely cared. Nothing but mud, sweat, and bug bites the size of fists breaking his back. </p><p>All Bobby could remember was how Jiho had called him like a sullied lullaby at 3AM the day before Minho moved to Seoul and practically shouted over the phone, "You're going to be best friends with the coolest guy in the universe. Like, you're gonna thank me for this." </p><p>Jiho nudging a sun drenched milk carton towards him with a knowing bittersweet-turned-sour smile and telling him to "Be nicer to my friend." </p><p>Jiho with a popsicle in his mouth half-devoured, a glint in his eyes half-borrowed, watching Bobby kiss Minho goodbye and softly droning, "In the future, when I'm not here, make sure to annoy him for me." </p><p>Jiho opening his mouth about something and always closing it with Minho this and Minho that. </p><p>He wants to vomit last decade's thunderstorm, to tell Minho all of this, that Jiho had always been his friend, that he had been the dearest to Jiho, that Jiho had been in love with him almost as much as Bobby is, that he was the drumming in Jiho's chest, the mounting in his throat, the flame gnawing at Jiho's insides until he forgets existing. But Jiho had made him promise not to tell, because, "Minho overthinks things, you know, he's sensitive like that."</p><p>So as Minho crumbles and breaks apart in the summer moon's palms, tears flooding the night, all Bobby can really say is, "He thought you'd be annoying if he told you, that was all."</p><p>Laying beside each other, hands pressed into other's chest, the scent of mint and cigarettes cutting into Minho's nose, worms eating away the breadth of Bobby's heart— the night leaves them falling behind in the morning. </p><p>In the coming days, Bobby and Minho move in together again, begin dating again, no longer strangers with zippers of flesh trying to swallow a dead love that splits their cheeks open. They talk about the cars they crashed and the jaws they broke over chamomile tea, they talk about the future, about wedding rings, about adopting a kid, they talk about milk stains and their first kiss, everything and anything but Jiho. Because Minho thinks Jiho never took him as a friend, not enough to confide in him, or find a home in the swamp of his soppy lungs and tadpole-infested heart. </p><p>And Bobby lets him believe that, because this isn't some movie where every character dies loved, with their memory held in a rose-colored glass box. Because sometimes, when you love someone enough, you'd let them hate you if that could give them even an ounce of happiness. It's not the type of love that turns clocks back, but it's the type that makes men and women run towards burning buildings, ashes shed like milkflower petals onto their scorched bodies. </p><p>Sometimes, Bobby thinks about slicing all of Jiho's old vinyls into halves and tieing them to the ceiling of their flat with ribbons of Jiho's old sweatshirts that he'd discovered in the fireplace, caked with ash and dried blood from street fights. Hanging above their head, empty grooves and swaying back and forth to no music except the whistling of the bitter, grieving wind, so the infesting memory of Jiho is born again and again. </p><p>And in a way, Bobby thinks, sometimes, that Jiho died with all his wishes answered, with a heart so full it nearly leaped out of his mouth. And Minho would never know, exactly, what a friend he'd lost, would never have his heart splintered, sliced into a nothing, into a powder, into a fabrication. </p><p>For them three, this would be an ending enough, like the way Jiho had said, smile like a midnight sun among the prickling grass and congested air, back when they had come back from a brawl with a neighboring school, wearing blood and bruises on their skin like quilts their own hands had sewed, "I'm a happiness thief."</p><p>"What?" Minho had laughed, bubbly and joyful, belonging down with the giggling whales and wingless sharks. </p><p>"I'm only happy when you are."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>chapter titles are from Snow and Dirty Rain by Richard Siken it's safe to say i'm obsessed with his works</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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